BEYOND the fine words about “peace,” “democracy” and “shared values,” what did the recent Nato and European Political Community summits really tell us?
 
Overwhelmingly, that “peace” in the mouths of today’s Western leaders means “war” and preparations for war. Of course, we are familiar with the favourite riposte of war-mongers: “Preparing for war is the best means of securing the peace.”
 
It matters not that this simplistic drivel has been disproved on countless occasions before and since the 1914-18 Great War.
 
Then, the peoples of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, etc. were told that rapid rearmament was essential given the aggressive intentions of well-armed rival imperialist powers (namely, each other) and the run-down of their own country’s armed forces.
 
Today, Nato and the EU co-ordinate the drive to increase public expenditure across Europe on “defence” — another duplicitous weasel word — with exactly the same arguments.
 
In Britain now, the only question permitted for discussion in our state and monopoly mass media is: “How soon will our defence spending reach 2.5 per cent of GDP?” A vacuous “debate” may then ensue about a mythical “road map” towards that hallowed goal.
 
Naturally, the moral and financial case against building four new Dreadnought nuclear submarines, and stockpiling 260 warheads in place of 160, is not part of this “debate.”
 
When BBC presenter Jo Coburn read out a tweet by Diane Abbott questioning the overriding priority given to extra military spending, her Politics Live panel guests — from “across the political spectrum” — appeared aghast that such thoughts should disrupt their Nato, EU and arms spending love-in.
 
Pouring billions more into Britain’s corrupt, incompetent and heavily subsidised arms corporations is beyond criticism.
 
Labour is pressing ahead with Tony Blair’s Trident renewal programme, even though it is running late and over budget. In January, the latest test-fired missile flopped into the sea instead of zooming thousands of miles into the mid-Atlantic.
 
The previously tested missile flew off course. The failure was hushed up until after a crucial Commons vote on Trident renewal, as prime minister Theresa May proclaimed her “absolute faith” in Trident and the Ministry of Defence announced the test had been a “success.”
 
When it comes to matters military and nuclear, the peoples of Britain and other imperialist powers have always been lied to routinely.
 
But the political leaders at the Hague, Washington DC and Blenheim Palace took co-ordinated dishonesty, obfuscation and hypocrisy to new levels.
 
In public, they concentrated their fire on Russia’s brutal overreaction to Nato’s eastward expansion, a drive which broke all pledges to President Putin and his predecessors.
 
Yet the ultimate target of US and Nato war-mongering is China. Hence the desperate efforts to portray President Xi Jinping’s government as a “decisive enabler” of Putin’s war on Ukraine.
 
This contrived claim serves to justify the Nato-led militarisation of the seas and territories surrounding China. From British-occupied Diego Garcia to South Korea and Japan, down through Taiwan to the Philippines and Australia, new military bases and beefed-up naval manoeuvres are targeting China.
 
We are warned constantly that Xi’s regime presents an existential threat to our security, to our “democratic Western values” and, even more nonsensically, our “way of life.”
 
Ukraine is supposedly the front-line battle in this momentous struggle, a country in which — beginning with the communists in 2015 — left-wing parties and trade unions have been suppressed.
 
As revealed at this summer’s summits, powerful circles in the US, Nato, the EU and member states now contemplate nuclear war against Russia or China with equanimity.
 
That would spell the end of peace, security and everybody’s way of life. Nobody can say we haven’t been warned.